This disclosure relates to expert systems and other information processing apparatuses and methods.

II. Background

An expert system can be described as a program or system that contains some subject-specific knowledge and emulates human reasoning. Typically, expert systems include a user interface, a knowledge base, an inference engine and a data base. The
user interface provides a portal for a user to interact with the expert system; the data base feeds data to the expert system; the knowledge base contains the rules that control the reasoning process; and the inference engine itself processes the rules
inside the knowledge base to emulate reasoning.

An example of an expert system might be a banking system configured to process loan applications. After an applicant files a loan application, the data from the loan application can be fed to the knowledge base, where rules embedded within the
expert system could determi . . . . More

Abstract:

In various embodiments, evolutionary expert systems and methods are
disclosed. For example, a method for evolving a rule base of an expert
system includes creating a set of meta-rules from a set of first rules
associated with the expert system, creating a set of one or more
generalized virtual rule candidates based on the set of first rules and
the set of meta-rules, filtering the set of generalized virtual rule
candidates to remove generalized virtual rule candidates that conflict
with at least one rule of the set of first rules to form a set of virtual
rules, and incorporating at least one virtual rule of the set of virtual
rules into the set of first rules to evolve the first set of rules.

Claims:

What is claimed is:

1. A method for evolving a rule base of an expert system on a computer, the method comprising: populating an application rule base stored in the computer with deterministic
and semantically normalized application rules, wherein each application rule is of the form f.sub.0, f.sub.1, f.sub.2, . . . .fwdarw.p.sub.0, p.sub.1, p.sub.2, . . . ; while the computer is in a dream mode, automatically populating a meta-rule base
with nondeterministic meta-rules of the form f.sub.0, f.sub.1, f.sub.2, . . . .fwdarw.p.sub.0, p.sub.1, p.sub.2, . . . f''.sub.0, f''.sub.1, f''.sub.2, . . . .fwdarw.p''.sub.0, p''.sub.1, p''.sub.2, . . . , wherein each meta-rule maps to two distinct
application rules; in response to a query regarding a given context, searching the application rule base for an application rule that has a matching context; if no application rule is found with a matching context, deriving from a sequence of
meta-rules a virtual rule with a matching conte . . . . More